Portrait of Martha Washington

Eleanor Parke Custis

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Eleanor Custis, known as "Nelly," was the granddaughter of Martha Washington and adopted stepdaughter of George Washington (Nelly Custis’s paternal grandfather was Daniel Parke Custis, Martha Washington’s first husband). Custis grew up at Mount Vernon, George and Martha Washington’s estate, then moved with the family in 1789 to the seat of government in New York following the election that made her step-grandfather the first president of the United States. A year later, the family moved to Philadelphia, where they would remain until Washington’s retirement from office in 1797. The art courses that Custis took while living in New York and Philadelphia likely included silhouette-cutting instruction, priming her to render this hollow-cut silhouette portrait of her grandmother, in which the negative profile was cut from board and placed atop a black fabric support. Custis created a silhouette portrait of George Washington that is also in The Met's collection (see accession number 79.6).

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art